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Yeah, so the problem I’m solving is not that I don’t think enough about something, or even that I don’t think about it in the right way. “Murky” was maybe the w

Yeah, so the problem I’m solving is not that I don’t think enough about something, or even that I don’t think about it in the right way. “Murky” was maybe the wrong word. It’s more that I often find my audience does not have the longest attention span or forgiveness for sloppy writing; thus, the onus is on me to make my thoughts as easy to digest as possible.

handoflixue 1y ago
As someone in a similar position, I have found I benefit from practicing - but also, LLMs are a really useful tool for that practice! Learning how to condense what I say focuses me to think about what is and isn't important - and it also forces me to think in terms of "style" and "audience". (My natural writing style is much more verbose - I want to address all sorts of branching objections and tangential concepts. I find parenthesis really useful, because I can dump a bunch of stuff there and it's a clear marker that you can safely skip it all) LLMs are also useful, because I can ramble, work out my own summary, and then compare to the LLM. Or, when I was just starting out, ramble, get an LLM to summarize, and then try to work out my own summary that captures what it missed. Aside from practice being inherently beneficial, I also find that being able to form my own summaries helps me catch when the LLM has misunderstood, hallucinated, or just subtly changed the emphasis - for instance, your original example was indeed much cleaner, but I wouldn't have felt like you were really truly a fellow rambler just from reading that. Hopefully you don't mind a rambling post. If you want a TL;DR an LLM can probably do a decent job ;) (ChatGPT Summary: Practicing summarization improves clarity, audience awareness, and writing focus—especially for naturally verbose thinkers. LLMs are helpful tools for this, both as a comparison point and a learning aid. Writing your own summaries sharpens understanding and helps catch LLM misinterpretations or emphasis shifts.) (Yeah, that seems pretty accurate)

handoflixue 1y ago

As someone in a similar position, I have found I benefit from practicing - but also, LLMs are a really useful tool for that practice! Learning how to condense what I say focuses me to think about what is and isn't important - and it also forces me to think in terms of "style" and "audience". (My natural writing style is much more verbose - I want to address all sorts of branching objections and tangential concepts. I find parenthesis really useful, because I can dump a bunch of stuff there and it's a clear marker that you can safely skip it all) LLMs are also useful, because I can ramble, work out my own summary, and then compare to the LLM. Or, when I was just starting out, ramble, get an LLM to summarize, and then try to work out my own summary that captures what it missed. Aside from practice being inherently beneficial, I also find that being able to form my own summaries helps me catch when the LLM has misunderstood, hallucinated, or just subtly changed the emphasis - for instance, your original example was indeed much cleaner, but I wouldn't have felt like you were really truly a fellow rambler just from reading that. Hopefully you don't mind a rambling post. If you want a TL;DR an LLM can probably do a decent job ;) (ChatGPT Summary: Practicing summarization improves clarity, audience awareness, and writing focus—especially for naturally verbose thinkers. LLMs are helpful tools for this, both as a comparison point and a learning aid. Writing your own summaries sharpens understanding and helps catch LLM misinterpretations or emphasis shifts.) (Yeah, that seems pretty accurate)